Look at my wonderful tubes!

I found this promotional picture in an old NAB conference technical papers book dating to 1969:

RCA TT-30FL promotional picture

So here we see an obviously qualified and appropriately dressed technician gesturing to all the components she is about to install in the transmitter behind her. I wish I worked there. No, wait, I wish I had that transmitter and perhaps this fetching young woman would come and work at my station. Well, hell, I don’t need a TV transmitter, just the woman.

Sigh.

I wonder how many of these rigs RCA sold before the broadcast division went out of business.

By way of reference, the RCA TT-30FL is a VHF television transmitter, 30 KW peak visual power, 7.5 KW peak audio power, air cooled.

One thought on “Look at my wonderful tubes!”

That woman can play with my transmitter tubes anytime. But trust me, you don’t want to deal with tuning the RCA Belchfire series from 10KW on up. Beasts to deal with. A tip, tune for minimum smoke lest the overload relays fire three times and out. Dealt with a pair of RCA Belchfire 20 KW transmitters into a combiner. We called them Cheech and Chong. And tuning them was up there with milking cobras for venom.